Rob Stubbs

Rob Stubbs has over 17 years of experience in the cybersecurity industry, with a strong focus on cryptography and key management, at leading vendors such as Cryptomathic, Ultra Electronics and Thales. At Ultra, Rob held Product Director and Engineering Director roles where he was responsible for the AEP Keyper HSM and other cryptographic products used by governments and enterprises worldwide. Rob has a hardware design background and was a founding employee of the 1980’s start-up Madge Networks, which grew to over 1,400 employees. He has also participated in the UK Crypto Developers Forum and its technical working groups. Rob is currently the Director of Sales for the EMEA region at Cryptomathic.

This article looks at the problems associated with key management that are common in many businesses today, where there is no clear ownership; then it examines the benefits of a centralized key management system and offers advice on building the business case to demonstrate both operational cost savings and a reduction in corporate risk.

With the increase in e-commerce and electronic communications on the one hand, and the growing challenges of cybercrime and data protection regulation on the other hand, cryptography is becoming an increasingly important business enabler.

This two-part article discusses how cryptography is employed within organizations today and examines some of the challenges it raises, both for large, established enterprises and for start-ups within emerging markets such as FinTech, Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain.

A number of serious security vulnerabilities, collectively known under the names of “Meltdown” and “Spectre”[1][2], have recently been discovered in a broad range of CPUs from Intel, ARM and AMD (some up to 20 years old) that are commonly used in servers, PCs and even mobile devices.